Top 8 Quotes & Sayings by Charles P. Kindleberger

Much of the profession is empirically bankrupt because it is no longer taught economic history.

The first derivative is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

What matters to us is the revelation of the swindle, fraud, or defalcation. This makes known to the world that things have not been as they should have been, that it is time to stop and see how they truly are. The making known of malfeasance, whether by the arrest or surrender of the miscreant, or by one of those other forms of confession, flight or suicide, is important as a signal that the euphoria has been overdone. The stage of overtrading may well come to an end. The curtain rises on revulsion, and perhaps discredit.

There is nothing so disturbing to one's well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich

Debasement was limited at first to one’s own territory. It was then found that one could do better by taking bad coins across the border of neighboring municipalities and exchanging them for good with ignorant common people, bringing back the good coins and debasing them again. More and more mints were established. Debasement accelerated in hyper-fashion until a halt was called after the subsidiary coins became practically worthless, and children played with them in the street, much as recounted in Leo Tolstoy’s short story, Ivan the Fool.

The propensity to swindle grows parallel with the propensity to speculate during a boom the implosion of an asset price bubble always leads to the discovery of frauds and swindles

Money is a public good; as such, it lends itself to private exploitation.

The period of financial distress is a gradual decline after the peak of a speculative bubble that precedes the final and massive panic and crash, driven by the insiders having exited but the sucker outsiders hanging on hoping for a revivial, but finally giving up in the final collapse.